Was anyone going to tell me I’ve been pronouncing “scadutree” wrong, or did I have to find out from a TikTok comment?
Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC introduces consumables called Scadutree fragments. These are found at Sites of Grace in the Land of Shadow, and they’re used to power up your character.
“That’s a silly-looking word,” I thought when I first read about them, mentally pronouncing it as “skad-oo-tree.”
But the word “scadu” is derived from the Old English “sceadu,” and should be pronounced more like “shadu,” or, you know, “shadow.” Shadow-tree. This information comes from distressed linguistics majors and history enthusiasts all over the internet, including Reddit, X, and the comments of our own TiKTok page.
This shouldn’t exactly have come as a surprise. Elden Ring has long used Old and Middle English, as well as Welsh and Irish words that Americans never learned to pronounce. I certainly breathed a sigh of relief when certified Irishman Cian Maher did us yanks a service by tweeting the correct pronunciation of the Lands Between’s Siofra River before I ever had to say the word out loud.
Gonna blow all non-Irish Elden Ring players’ minds: Siofra is pronounced Sheef-rah
— Cian Maher (@cianmaher0) March 8, 2022
The devotion to including Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish in translations of FromSoft games is genuinely cool. Over decades of English colonization these languages were repressed, often banned, and are still considered endangered.
Old and Middle English words like “scadu” and “gaol” are from a different linguistic family, but it’s always exciting to learn how not to embarrass myself when I talk.
